“Transparent Eyeball” Emerson T-shirt (women’s)

$ 25.00

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So it’s root, root, root for the home team;If they don’t win, it’s the hobgoblin of little minds.

Let’s be honest: if there were a professional sports franchise in Ralph Waldo Emerson’s hometown of Concord, Massachusetts, it would probably be called the Minutemen. But it’s nice to imagine a world in which it would be called the Transparent Eyeballs, after Emerson’s famous image of going for a walk in the country and feeling a trippy connection to the universe, as he describes in his 1836 essay “Nature”:

Standing on the bare ground,—my head bathed by the blithe air, and uplifted into infinite space,—all mean egotism vanishes. I become a transparent eye-ball; I am nothing; I see all; the currents of the Universal Being circulate through me; I am part or particle of God.

Even in 1836, this was rather over-the-top. Emerson’s friend Christopher Cranch sketched an affectionate caricature of Emerson-as-eyeball gazing off into “infinite space.” We’ve vintage-teeified Cranch’s illustration.